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PAINFUL LESSONS DEPT.
It can feel like Death “By Friendly Fire”
In 2004 I owned and worked on a fully loaded Sony Vaio laptop. It was my first, and last, non-Mac computer. I liked it, though. At the office I’d been forced to get rid of my Mac there in order to be “in sync” with the work culture I was in. I wasn’t persuaded this was a good idea but accepted the corporate decree from on high. (A year or two later we hired two graphic designers from an agency and they were each provided with powerful Mac workstations.)
All this to say that late one Friday night I was working on the computer and something went wrong. I cannot recall the details other than this one. I have always had an iMac in my home office as well as my working laptop, so I Googled to see what the fix might be to my problem.
I followed the steps and finally reach a critical point where I had to make The Decision. “Are you sure you want to continue?” with a Yes button and a No button. It was 11:30 p.m. on a Friday night. I couldn’t use my “Call a Friend” lifeline. I chose “Yes.”
As soon as I hit enter I realized, like suicide-attempters jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, that I’d made a mistake, but it was too late. The procedure it set in motion was to wipe clean my hard drive, like wiping fingerprints off a murder weapon.
In short I lost everything and I was emotionally devastated.
LESSON ONE: WHEN IN DOUBT CHICKEN OUT
This was the first time ever that I totally lost everything. Yes, I did have some backed up files but it was nowhere near current, and (fortunately) all the work I had from my Mac years was safe on my iMac. Still, it was worse than painful and for several days I kicked myself for the stupidity of making such a flippant late night decision.
And then the news came that Pat Tillman had been killed in Afghanistan by “friendly fire.” Friendly fire is a euphemism for “Oh no, we killed our own man.” A metaphor for wiping out your hard drive. This news emerged approximately one month after the first story in which we learned that he had been killed while fighting in the Middle East.
